Ftrain, by Paul Ford

I talk a lot with [Wife] about staying true to the plan. "I wonder what would knock me off," I said last night. "A new job, maybe."

"Going out a lot for lunch with your new coworkers would be hard. But you'd probably be able to get a handle on that."

I nodded. "Probably."

Later she said: "When I told you you'd end up handsome you became angry."

Yes. I remember being disgusted by the prospect. Which may have registered as anger. I note that but I don't necessarily want to unwrap that at this juncture. There are so many other presents to unwrap. It's just that Christmas was always this fucking battlezone.

"Fat Tax," David Leonhardt, the New York Times:

What has changed is our environment. Parents are working longer, and takeout meals have become a default dinner. Gym classes have been cut. The real price of soda has fallen 33 percent over the last three decades. The real price of fruit and vegetables has risen more than 40 percent.

The solutions to these problems are beyond the control of any individual. They involve a different sort of responsibility: civic — even political — responsibility. They depend on the kind of collective action that helped cut smoking rates nearly in half. Anyone who smoked in an elementary-school hallway today would be thrown out of the building. But if you served an obesity-inducing, federally financed meal to a kindergartner, you would fit right in. Taxes on tobacco, meanwhile, have skyrocketed. A modest tax on sodas — one of the few proposals in the various health-reform bills aimed at health, rather than health care — has struggled to get through Congress.

Cosgrove’s would-be approach may have its problems. The obvious one is its severity. The more important one is probably its narrowness: not even one of the nation’s most prestigious hospitals can do much to reduce obesity. The government, however, can. And that is the great virtue of Cosgrove’s idea. He is acknowledging that any effort to attack obesity will inevitably involve making value judgments and even limiting people’s choices. Most of the time, the government has no business doing such things. But there is really no other way to cure an epidemic.

This cannot happen. Not the fat tax, not systematic change of our food system. Such change is impossible. The fat tax would alienate 30-60 percent of your constituents. And lobbyists for agribusiness, as well as agribusiness donations to congressional campaigns, mean changing the food supply is impossible.

This is a gluttonous country; it's a national, rather than individualized, gluttony that put us here. The two are related, though. Now it's up to people to change the system; of course the slender, as always, have appointed themselves protectors, even though they have the least understanding of the problem.

Weight: 333.5 lbs